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Brewing up controversy
A Scottish brewery has launched what is possibly the world’s strongest beer – boasting 32% alcohol content. And the result has been a lot of buzz. PR buzz that is.
BrewDog of Fraserburgh, Scotland, last month unveiled “Tactical Nuclear Penguin.” The beer lays claim to being the world’s strongest. Ever. Whether or not that’s true (or even a good idea taste-wise) the BrewDog team deserves high marks for its creative approach to brand building.
A warning on the label states: “This is an extremely strong beer; it should be enjoyed in small servings and with an air of aristocratic nonchalance. In exactly the same manner that you would enjoy a fine whiskey, a Frank Zappa album or a visit from a friendly yet anxious ghost.”
It’s gotten them into hot water with responsible use groups in the UK and that, in turn, has gotten them a lot of press, which it turns out is nothing new for BrewDog. It would seem to be their master plan, in fact.
From their IPA, aged two months at sea on a voyage around the North Atlantic, to the launch of a “by special order only” 18.2% alcohol beer called “Tokyo” (which it then followed with a low-alcohol beer called “Nanny State” in response to media fuss surrounding the high-alcohol content of Tokyo), to their latest: announcing the world’s strongest beer in penguin suits . . . they know how to get people talking.
The brewery has garnered itself editorial coverage in UK papers: The Sunday Times, The Metro, The Financial Times, The Independent, The Guardian, The Sunday Herald, The Daily Mail, The Sun, plus many others. And that has led to distribution by Tesco, ASDA, Sainsbury’s and Oddbins in the UK, along with distribution in 13 other countries around the world.
Me? I heard about TNP from the drive-time host of Toronto’s Classic Rock station, Q107. “Tactical Nuclear PR Strategy,” if you ask me.
Grip interviews: Erica Ehm
Erica Ehm is the Founder and Editor-in-chief of YummyMummyClub.ca.
1) Twitter is to marketing as _____ is to _____?
Oh god, I’m too tired to do this. Pass please.
2) What’s the big idea behind Yummy Mummy Club?
It’s an online magazine that speaks to the woman in every mom.
I think the marketing world has been getting the mom market all wrong. This generation of women with kids is more than somebody’s mom. A majority of us are well-educated career women who include children in our lives, but have many other interests as well.
When I first launched YummyMummyClub.ca, the only ads marketers wanted to place with us was for diapers. They assumed my readers were only interested in their kids. It’s taken me three years of standing on my mummy soapbox, but now clients are understanding that moms are equally interested in pop culture, electronics, fashion, makeup, movies, cars and careers – all reflected in the myriad of eclectic blogs and articles written by and for moms on our site. The content is edgy, playful, modern and relevant – like my peers. It’s a very exciting and powerful community to be a part of these days.
3) There’s a thread of empowerment that underlies the site. Is that a result of feeling marginalized in some way when you left behind your entertainment industry career to become a full-time mom?
Becoming a mother was the most difficult transition I’ve ever been through. No one told me how hard it would be. I felt ashamed and guilty. I secretly believed I was a bad mother. But after “confessing” my shame to other moms, I realized I wasn’t alone. There was an army of intelligent, capable ex-career women out there feeling like I did. So I launched a tiny grassroots website to share the secrets of what life is really like as a mom and to let moms know we’re all going through the same shit.
A pivotal moment for me was at a dinner party six months after I had my son. Some trendy dude was chatting with me and asked what I did. I proudly said “I’m staying home with my son,” rather than what I was doing career wise. As soon as I alluded to the fact that I was a “stay at home mom,” groovy dude starts scanning the room for someone more interesting to talk to. I was so angry I wanted to say, “You just missed out talking to Erica freakin’ Ehm.” It was a terrible experience. But it also helped me understand why so many moms feel invisible.
So, to answer your question, yes my site is all about empowering moms to feel proud about their choices, lifestyle and interests. If more moms felt passionate about their day-to-day lives, we’d be raising even better kids. Mums are role models and we want our kids to be strong, interesting, and proud. We have to walk the talk. Yummy is a state of mind.
4) On your site you’ve redefined the term “MILF.” Tell us how and why?
Just like I appropriated the term Yummy Mummy and turned into an expression of empowerment, I want to do the same with MILF. I invite our readers to go to this page and create their own acronym. The results have been both hilarious and heartfelt. Now when I hear the word MILF, there isn’t that same sexist sting to it. Now I think of a definition like, “Multi-tasking Inspired Life-making Freaking babes.” Are you smiling yet?
5) It seems that I get a dozen or more tweets and status updates from you a day – how are you able to keep that pace?
I’m obsessed with Twitter. Actually I’m obsessed with communicating with my readers and Twitter is the most direct and effective way that works for me. I can have chats with my readers and real time interactions. I feel like I have so much to talk/tweet about. The content on my site is quite extraordinary and I can’t wait to shout it out to anyone who will listen. I’ve met amazing like-minded women and men on Twitter.
Bottom line – my business has grown more than 20% directly from Twitter since I caught the Twitter bug a year ago.
6) What’s been the biggest “ah-ha” you’ve had on the learning curve as an online marketer?
That I was an online marketer. I’m a mom with a message and a vision. I want to revolutionize motherhood. So I guess that also means addressing the way the media relates to moms. I’m not an expert in marketing. I’ve never been to marketing school. I just understand who’s buying. It’s me. I’m in the mom gang.
7) What are big, traditional marketers missing when it comes to marketing to women using the web and social media?
Don’t patronize us. Talk to us. Listen to us. Join the conversation. Give and don’t ask for something in return. Talk to us like we get it. Talk about things other than motherhood. You may be surprised at the amazing conversations and connections you’ll make. Be authentic. We can smell a fake.
8) Could Erica Ehm the MuchMusic VJ survive a week in Erica the entrepreneurial mom’s shoes?
I’m the same person. When I worked at MuchMusic I also had a hat business, I had a record label, I was a songwriter, I acted, I did voiceovers – and that was while working full-time on air.
I like to work. To create. I was a multi-tasker back then – I’m doing the same thing today, only now all while taking care of two great kids. To survive parenthood you need to be a master multi-tasker, so I would ask – would Erica Ehm the MuchMusic host be able to keep up with Erica Ehm today? Probably not.
9) How would you use your digital marketing expertise to fix the music biz?
The problem with the music biz is the same as the broadcasting biz. It’s bloated. Self-important. The playing field has shifted. The net has democratized the media. People have the power. The music biz old guard is still trying to find ways to wrestle power away from the consumer, while those on the cutting edge are working with the consumer. Just like traditional TV broadcasters, the winners are going grassroots, being authentic and fair.
10) Where are you at with your songwriting?
Sadly I don’t have enough time to write. The last thing I wrote and produced was this.
11) What’s the coolest app on your iPhone?
It will be the app I’m creating for YMC (but I use a BlackBerry).
The death of Flash?
Last August Advertising Age published an article by Garrick Schmitt on the demise of Flash and rise of HTML5. Schmitt is the VP of Experience Planning for Razorfish. In his piece, he made a number of points as to why Flash will die. A lot of them were misleading or ill-informed. Also, though HTML5 has a lot of new capabilities, capabilities alone does not ensure success of a new technology.
Schmitt starts his article by defining the word, “loading.”
“Regardless of how fast our internet connections get, it still seems that we’re perpetually waiting for our digital media – websites, videos, pictures, music – to load. It’s a twisted feedback loop: faster broadband begets bigger and bigger file sizes. All of which makes accessing that Flash-heavy product microsite a perpetual exercise in patience.”
The myth that flash is heavy, and causes long load times is one I have been battling with fact and frustration for years. The fact is that an image is an image, whether it is embedded in Flash or in a web page.
The culture of loaders is a result of two things: the first is style. Creatives, and most rich media developers believe that pre-loading (loading assets upfront in a larger chunk, rather than on the fly) lends a better user experience. The idea being that the user volunteers 15-30 seconds of their time looking at a pretty loading graphic, and in exchange they get access to the experience and information without interruption.
But pre-loading is a design choice, not a limitation of Flash. Flash has the capability of loading in its assets piecemeal just like an HTML page does. And if you were to add up the total load size and time of all the assets of a Flash application, and that of an HTML application, their sizes and load times would be nearly identical (save a KB here and there). This is illustrated nicely in Schmitt’s own article where he posts some of the experiments done with HTML 5. If you follow this link you will see something interesting at the beginning.
Look, it says “loading.” But it’s HTML. I thought HTML eliminates loading?
Another thing that prophets of Flash’s demise fail to consider is the community of developers (the people that make the websites). HTML developers have had access to tools through AJAX, DHTML, CSS, and Javascript for some time now. They could use these tools to create experience-driven sites. Sites that are more about form than function.
As processor speeds increase, the limitations of Javascript as an effective language to deliver visual experiences have all but dried up. So what has been the result?
HTML-based sites still tend to be information-centric (function over form); and Flash-based sites experience-centric. The reason for this is community. HTML developers are not in the habit of thinking in terms of pure experience over content. Flash developers are not in the habit of thinking in terms of content over experience. In fact, the opposite it true. Propose a content adjustment that will affect the experience of a site to a Flash developer or designer and watch the sparks fly.
In order for HTML5 to spell the death of Flash, proponents of HTML5 will either need to change the culture of current HTML developers, or convert Flash developers to HTML5. Neither of which is likely to happen overnight.
Finally, comparing HTML5 to Flash in its present state is like Microsoft comparing Windows 7 to the last version of Apple’s OS X. Thanks for catching up, but we are already on to the next thing. By the time HTML5 is available on a large enough audience of browsers to make it feasible for professional use, Flash will no longer be Flash as we know it. It will have evolved further, along with the community.
For example, at the time of publishing of Schmitt’s article, he rightly pointed out, “Today’s Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android OS are now supporting HTML 5, not Flash.”
Since then Adobe has announced that by early 2010 you will be able to publish Flash applications as iPhone applications, and submit them to the app store. There are already thousands of Flash developers ready and able to create mobile applications starting Q1 or Q2, 2010. The number of HTML5-ready app devs is far fewer.
Who knows what Flash will look like, or what a Flash developer will look like two to three years from now when HTML5 is ready. But I can guarantee it will be very different from what they are today.
For me, the net-net is that Flash is currently the best option to create rich media and Internet applications. It is going to take more than just a comparable technology to dethrone it. It will take serious missteps by Adobe combined with a mass exodus of the community. And I don’t see that happening for quite some time.
A Movember to remember
(Our Movember participants, from left to right. Top row: Shane Holmes, Martin McClorey, Paul Dhillon. Middle row: Ron Dunstan, Graham Budd, Mike Kassar. Bottom row: Brian Ross, Rich Fortin, Patrick Robinson. Photographed by Todd McLellan, Sugino Studios.)
Another Movember has come and gone. And for those of you who were wondering about the sharp increase in moustaches per capita last month, Movember is one of the fastest growing fundraising events on the planet – both in terms of participation and almighty dollars. The month-long tribute to moustaches (”Mos” for short) started in 2004 in Australia and raised a grand total of nada in year one (it wasn’t actually a fundraiser that year). In the five years since then, it has become a worldwide phenomenon, raising more $35 millon this year alone for the fight against prostate cancer.
Many agencies, including Grip, love this fundraiser. And it’s not just for the pleasure of satisfying our urge to look like 70s porn-stars. Movember is a veritable case study in best practices on fundraising and non-profit marketing.
How did they do it?
1. Simple method of participation.
All you have to do is not shave your upper lip for one month, nothing else. The only stipulations are that it can’t connect to your sideburns (a beard), nor can you have any hair on your chin (a goatee). Dead easy.
2. Highly visible and conversational awareness tool (a.k.a. a moustache).
We’ve all seen the yellow Livestrong bracelet and every possible colour of ribbon, and sure, these are decent awareness tools. The moustache functions in the same way – and then some. Not only is the face the first thing you look at when meeting someone (so everyone is going to notice, regardless of what you are wearing), but a new moustache coming in is an immediate trigger for starting conversations about the cause. Don’t believe me? Consider a typical Mo conversation: “What the hell is that on your face, Bob?” “Well Steve, glad you asked. It’s for Movember, in support of prostate cancer research by…” Raising awareness through conversation just comes that much easier.
3. Personal expression.
You can grow a Mo to suit your personality. Wanna look like Hulk Hogan? Go for the bleached-blonde handlebar. Magnum PI? How about a thick classic moustache (with floral print shirt). Ok, not really a marketing tactic per say, but it makes participation that much more fun, especially when you dress up to match your Mo at one of the many Gala parties.
4. Painless donations (with instant tax receipts).
Becoming the norm for fundraisers, but cannot be overlooked – instant tax receipts by email when people donate online.
5. Social functions all built in to the donation pages.
Donations pages that allow you to post pictures and comments of your Mo and donation progress, allow donors to comment and vote on your Mo, and links to tweet and post to your Facebook status.
6. Tagline.
“Changing the face of men’s health.” Nuff said, right? It’s smart and just works really well for the event.
7. Motivating the fundraisers.
Above and beyond wanting to do good for the cause, fundraisers are rewarded for their hard work. Leveraging sponsor-provided prizing and Gala tickets, fundraisers receive prizing for hitting certain fundraising levels. Larger scale individual and team fundraising prizes. Plain old best moustache prizes. All this adds up to one motivated fundraising force.
8. Great themed experiential events.
Gala parties in major cities in all participating countries. Dress up to match your Mo, and win prizes. They are super fun, draw huge crowds, and add another great layer to the overall event.
All in all, a great fundraising and communications success story, and definitely a fundraiser to track in the coming years.
Are there any other keys to Movember’s success you would add?
Your holiday reading list
You know about TED, right? The small, non-profit devoted to “Ideas worth spreading”? TED’s ever expanding online database has more than 500 15-minute videos: the TED Talks – ranging from Al Gore’s climate to Jane Goodall’s primates, and all points in between.
If I had one issue with all that knowledge, it would be that while it’s topically diverse, it often just scratches the surface. In other words, it’s a mile wide but only 15 minutes deep.
For people hungry to dive deeper into TED’s world of ideas this holiday season and beyond, check out this list from its book club:
• An Inconvenient Truth – Al Gore
• Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming – Bjorn Lomborg
• Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises – Kate Stohr and Cameron Sinclair
• Earth From Above – Yann Arthus-Bertrand
• Everything Bad Is Good for You – Steven Johnson
• In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing – Matthew E. May
• Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City – Eric W. Sanderson
• McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld – Misha Glenny
• The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World – Jacqueline Novogratz
• Ocean: An Illustrated Atlas – Sylvia A. Earle and Linda K. Glover
• Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions – Dan Ariel
• slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations – Nancy Durate
• Stumbling on Happiness – Daniel Gilbert
• The Assault on Reason – Al Gore
• The Atlas of the Real World – Daniel Dorling
• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable – Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It – Paul Collier
• The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope – William Kamkwamba
• The Case for God – Karen Armstrong
• The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone: Reflections on India – The Emerging 21st-Century Power – Shashi Tharoor
• The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom – Jonathan Haidt
• The Invention of Air – Steven Johnson
• The Invention of Hugo Cabret – Brian Selznick
• The Untied States of America: Polarization, Fracturing, and Our Future – Juan Enriquez
• Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us – Seth Godin
• What Are You Optimistic About? – Edited by John Brockman
• What Matters: The World’s Preeminent Photojournalists and Thinkers Depict Essential Issues of Our Time – David Elliot Cohan
• What We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today’s Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty – Edited by John Brockman
• Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto – Stewart Brand
• Work Hard. Be Nice.: How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America – Jay Mathews
Have you already read any of these? Would you recommend them? Why or why not?
Digital versus Traditional: The Great Agency Debate
Who will lead? This is the crux of an industry-wide debate that’s getting a lot of opinion, speculation and debate right now. The burning and potentially lucrative question being: “Who sits at the head of the table when the client calls for input on the brand plan or at a brainstorm on where to spend in the fourth quarter?”
Two recent articles in AdAge shed light on each side of the debate:
Why digital agencies aren’t ready to lead.
Why digital agencies are indeed ready to lead.
The former takes the position that digitally led shops are not ready to lead, because they “lack the balance of Exploration and Exploitation.” In other words, they perform well at the cutting edge, but fall short on consistent and predictable ROI.
The latter responds that digital is indeed ready to take pole position because its practitioners understand technology, analytics and the demand for speed as it relates to iteration of ideas as the brand/consumer dialogue unfolds in real time.
Both make great arguments. Both incited a healthy burst of reaction, as evidenced by the wealth of comments each of them received.
My two cents on the subject?
I think it’s fair to say that digital (the channel, not the shops) has found its way to the centre of the connection map – it is the new and improved CRM. And shops that respect and understand this will earn their place “at the table” – be they traditional, digital, or even design- or promotions-led.
Core competency will no longer determine where we sit at that table, the demands of a category’s specific customer/client interaction will. Beverage companies will likely want more influence from agencies closer to campuses and nightclubs (the feet on the street as Grip’s Managing Partner, Business, Bob Shanks likes to call them), while sneaker companies, for example, will inevitably turn to partners more intimate with emerging and future trends in fashion.
What clients are really going to be evaluating with respect to who is on their agency partner roster is whether you are FAST or DEEP. The former will be built to create and react to many marketing threats, in real time, 24/7. The latter (and likely smaller) of the two, will serve as brand steward, mining perspective and insight from the plethora of data and insight uncovered by the former, with the goal of helping figure out where a brand can and should invest itself long term, via sponsorships, packaging and line extensions, even R&D.
Frankly, neither will lead. That burden and/or honour will reside (as it historically has) with the CMO of a newly evolved marketing department that will in time reveal itself to be more nimble, less dogmatic, and presumably better funded.
As Anne Busquet, former EVP of American Express stated so eloquently in Sergio Zyman’s book The End of Advertising as We Know It, ” It’s not the age of the internet, it’s the age of customer control.”
Augmented Reality. No longer lame?
Esquire Magazine’s December issue is the latest to jump on the augmented reality (AR) bandwagon. But what distinguishes it from most other brands using AR is that there’s actually some interesting content to check out.
Most of the time, it seems, AR is treated like a novelty, and rarely give users anything of real value. Strategy Magazine, for example, used AR on the cover of its November issue to reveal who they picked for Agency of the Year, despite the fact that if you just flipped to page 16 you could see that it wasn’t Grip Limited. (Sour grapes? Editor.)
Now that the novelty of AR has worn off, I find it pretty silly to be awkwardly tilting a sheet of paper in front of my webcam just to see a spaceship or bigfoot. The barrier to participation is high (go to the site, print out the image, turn on your webcam, hold the paper up to your computer), so the content better be worthwhile.
Back to Esquire. If you buy the issue (and then go to their site and download some software), you get a bunch of exclusive content. You get some Robert Downey Jr., you get a fashion spread and you get their “Funny Jokes From A Beautiful Woman” feature.
Now, this is hardly a horn o’ plenty of awesome content (and it all could’ve been easily dumped onto their site), but it signifies a notable, mainstream progression in using AR to deliver something of value to people. And Esquire is not alone.
Burger King recently promoted their Value menu with an in-banner AR feature. You hold up a dollar bill, and all the items on the BK menu that are a buck appear. Using AR in an online ad is pretty darn clever, I have to say.
The Unites States Postal Service have a virtual box simulator that uses AR to show you which size box you’ll need for your shipment. Handy.
But one of the most clever uses of AR I’ve seen from a brand comes from online clothing retailer Tobi.com. I’m not much of a women’s clothing shopper but even I found this interesting. It’s called Fashionista and it acts like a virtual fitting room.
How it works: You go to their site, you pick some clothes, you virtually try ‘em on. A slinky black number, let’s say, is superimposed on screen. You stand in front of it and can see what you look like in it. Don’t like it, pick another. Love it? Snap a pic of yourself “in it” and post it on Facebook to get your friends’ opinions (and to show them how nerdy you are).
Genuine benefit. Clever social media extension. No cheesy novelty. It’s AR done right.
Grip interviews: Ryan Wagman
Ryan Wagman is outgoing Associate Creative Director at Crispin Porter + Bogusky in Boulder, Colorado – and incoming Creative Director for the Nintendo account at Leo Burnett in Chicago.
1) The Internet is to advertising as ____ is to ____?
The Internet is to advertising as sun is to earth. Dana White is to MMA. Wheelchairs are to murderball. I don’t think advertising really works without it.
2) What do you like about writing for the interactive space?
In the last scene of Almost Famous, Russell Hammond was asked what he loves about music.
“To begin with, everything.”
I love that line. And I agree. If you’re a writer that actually LIKES writing, nothing comes close to interactive.
Say you love writing TV. Interactive affords you the opportunity to write scripts that aren’t bound to any particular timeframe. We wrote about nine minutes of ridiculous TV-style content for whenkingonsattack.com. Nine minutes – that’s someone’s entire TV reel if they’re lucky.
If you love writing headline-driven work, I think interactive is better for that, too. Look at that Pringles banner. It’s basically just 150 headlines. But engaging as hell.
3) How do you feel about the ways success is measured for online campaigns?
We put a lot of time into measuring campaign effectiveness here. How many people visited, for how long, how many uniques, how many click-throughs, etc. But Crispin never measures things based solely on those numbers. Online or traditional, campaigns have to be compelling enough that they themselves become the story rather than just a commercial interlude. Nobody likes advertising. People like content.
4) What’s one of the common mistakes you see brands making in the interactive space?
“Just put it up on Youtube and let it go viral.”
5) Who are some of your creative influences and why?
Zak Mroueh because he taught me to push ideas further than I thought possible.
Michael Chabon because he made my preferred writing style – long, conversational, occasionally complicated and tangential – cool.
Bill Wright because he’s the best writer I’ve ever seen up close.
Everyone on TED
My dad.
Jeff Benjamin because he is a near-perfect gauge of what people will think is fun.
Guybrush Taylor because he changed his fucking name to Guybrush in like 5th grade. At an age where I was still doing anything to avoid being noticed he had the balls to be different.
6) Any tips for helping clients get comfortable with the wild side of their brands?
No. Some brands have wild sides and some don’t. I’m comfortable with that. For example, I think Zingr tagging for Miracle Whip is really cool idea – but it seems wrong for them. There’s nothing less cool than trying too hard. Ask anyone I went to high school with.
7) What’s funny?
God, I don’t know. How long is a piece of string?
Police sketches are pretty funny, I guess.
8) Assuming you’ve been in this position at least once in your career, how do you get excited about making ads for a product you don’t believe in?
I would say I’ve been pretty lucky to work on things I like. MINI. Nike. Burger King. But to be honest, it really doesn’t matter. I get excited to write and I get excited to make stuff. Making people laugh or think or see things from your perspective is pretty heady. If you can’t get excited for that, you’re at the wrong agency or in the wrong business.
9) As an Associate Creative Director, what’s your leadership style?
I definitely know what I’m looking for, so I tend to be pretty direct and clear with people. But not a prick. This job is tough enough without having to work with assholes.
The only other thing I’d say I do intentionally is be giving. Of my time and my ideas. That was a Rob Guenette-ism. The door was always open.
10) Craft-wise, what are you hoping to be better at two years from now?
Finally, a softball. Everything.
11) How did you come to learn that Mike Tyson likes pigeons?
Hahaha. I don’t know that I can share any of that story here. But I can tell you that he has a pigeon farm, he likes women of questionable character and he bogarts.
Hitching your brand to a star: part two
So Tiger is a bust. His squeaky clean image is broken and it turns out he’s not perfect after all. In fact, he may have done some pretty despicable things. Should Nike, Gillette and AT&T bail out – or can they ride out this storm?
I believe my previous advice still follows: before aligning your brand with a celebrity you need to do your homework. Now let’s say you’ve done all that and your celebrity still comes off the rails. Let’s talk about damage control.
Do you have a plan for navigating through this difficult time? Should you comment publicly and support your star or do you watch from the sidelines as the carnage plays out. It’s a difficult position to be in, but having a plan of attack is critical.
A few ideas:
1. Gather as much information as possible from your contact (the source, agent, PR manager, lawyer, others) about the real story. Is there more to it than the media is currently reporting? Things not made public yet, but that will be coming shortly? What is the star’s communication strategy in this situation? As a paying customer, you have the right to know.
2. Bring together key internal stakeholders to determine your position – is the celebrity’s transgression a deal breaker? Could the association be negative for your brand (with consumers, employees, shareholders, key partners, etc.)? How will you measure that on short notice? An internal survey amongst your employees and best customers may help you get a quick gauge of public perception.
3. Develop a plan to communicate your company position internally and externally. What will you say and when? Who will send the message? How will they send it and to whom (email, blog, press release, phone, media)?
4. Continue to monitor the situation and be ready to re-evaluate and course-correct as required.
Having a plan makes good sense. But to be effective it needs to be well thought out – not reactive. Take a few minutes when you begin your celebrity relationship to consider what could go wrong and develop a road map for how to deal with it.
